Tasha Kheiriddin: Will “in and out” put election on ice?

As the Conservatives’ poll numbers inflate like a balloon on steroids, along comes a giant pin, in the form of Elections Canada, and now, the Federal Court of Appeal. Yesterday’s decision, which overturned a lower court’s ruling exculpating the party for its “in and out” financing scheme during the 2006 election, threatens to bring the Tories down to earth – and potentially stave off a spring vote.

The ruling comes a scant four days after Elections Canada announced it would be laying charges against four Tory fundraisers, including Senators Doug Finley and Irving Gerstein. The spectacle of these two gentlemen facing possible jail time – Mr. Finley is undergoing chemotherapy for colorectal cancer, and Mr. Gerstein just celebrated his 70th birthday – is not exactly a positive visual for Elections Canada, but a worse one for the Tories.

Mr. Finley is one of Prime Minister’s closest advisors, the architect of his past two electoral victories. Mr. Gerstein is a fundraising institution in the party, who for years chaired the venerable PC Canada Fund. Thus it is difficult to imagine that Mr. Harper himself was not aware of the “in and out” transfers when they occurred. This poses a problem for a party which ran on a platform of accountability, transparency, and “we are not the party of the Sponsorship Scandal”. While overspending on election advertising is hardly in the same league as the scheme which diverted millions of dollars to Liberal ad agencies over a period of years, the sin – an alleged attempt to circumvent “the system” at the expense of the public purse – sounds the same.

The only silver lining for the Tories is that Elections Canada did not lay the charges in the middle of an election, like the RCMP did in 2006 when they named then-Liberal finance minister Ralph Goodale in a criminal investigation on the issue of income trusts and insider trading. That act was seen by many observers as a tipping point for Liberal fortunes, the final straw for a party already suffering the ethical taint of the Sponsorship Scandal.

Nevertheless, the timing of the Elections Canada charges does raise questions. Why did the agency not wait for the Court of Appeal ruling to come down first? Did officials know which way the case was going to go – and if they did, how? Or did the Court speed up its ruling, once Elections Canada decided to prosecute? Whatever the answers (and conspiracy theorists can have a field day with this), the fact remains that between them, these bodies laid a one-two punch to the Conservatives at the same time that the party’s political stock is rising, a budget is looming (March 22!), and an election is “in the air”. Which makes a vote now less likely, in my books, unless the Tories can succeed in dispelling this new waft of scandal which is clouding their otherwise sunny week.